I Love Bees

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The front page of ilovebees.com, the starting point of the titular alternate reality game
The front page of ilovebees.com, the starting point of the titular alternate reality game

I Love Bees (also known as ilovebees or ILB for short) was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2. I Love Bees was created by 42 Entertainment and commissioned by Microsoft. The game was first advertised by a subliminal message in a Halo 2 trailer; players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story, involving a marooned artificial intelligence stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together.

I Love Bees was a marketing success; 250,000 people viewed the ilovebees website when it was launched in August of 2004, and more than 500,000 returned to the site every time the pages were updated. More than three million visitors viewed the site over the course of three months,[1] and thousands of people participated in the game. I Love Bees won numerous awards for its innovation and helped spawn numerous other alternate reality games for video games.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Alternate reality games or ARGs are designed to involve fans of video games or other media in a form of viral marketing which CNET described as encompassing "real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online [communities]".[2] I Love Bees began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in alternate reality games. The jars contained letters leading to the I Love Bees website and a countdown.[3] At around the same time, an advertisement for Halo 2 flashed a link to ilovebees.com, ostensibly a hacked site related to beekeeping;[3]

Both events, not connected publicly for several weeks, caused the curious to visit the website ilovebees.com. The site, which appeared to be dedicated to honey sales and beekeeping, was covered in confusing random characters and sentence fragments. Dana, the ostensible webmaster of the ilovebees site, created a weblog stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked.[4] Suspecting that this was a mystery that could be unraveled, Halo and ARG fans spread the link and began to work on figuring out what was going on.

Players of I Love Bees responding to a planned phone call
Players of I Love Bees responding to a planned phone call

The gameplay of I Love Bees tasked players around the world to work together to solve problems, with little or no direction or guidance.[5] For example, the game presented players with 210 pairs of global positioning system coordinates and time codes, with no indications to what the locations referred to.[5] Players eventually figured out the coordinates referred to pay phones and the times to when the phones would ring; one player in Florida stayed by a phone while Hurricane Frances was minutes away in order to recite answers to prerecorded questions.[6] Other phone calls were made by live persons known as "operators"; these calls allowed players to interact with the characters of the games in spontaneous and occasionally humorous ways.[7]

Other players treated the corrupted data on ilovebees.com as encrypted files to decipher, or used image files found on the web server to solve puzzles.[6] After players completed certain tasks, they were rewarded with new installments to an audio drama which revealed the reasons for the ilovebees.com malfunction.[6]

The game culminated by inviting players of the game to visit one of four cinemas where they could get a chance to play Halo 2 before its release and collect a commemorative DVD.[8]

[edit] Plot

Further information: I Love Bees synopsis

The plot of I Love Bees is convoluted and open to interpretation with regard to gaps in the story. The game's story begins with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, leaving the craft's controlling artificial intelligence or AI damaged. This AI, known as the "Operator" or "Melissa", is not alone; other AI programs share its system. One program, called "SPDR" (System Peril Distributed Reflex) or "Spider", is a software task meant to repair Melissa, but Melissa, disoriented and self-protecting, does not take kindly to SPDR's interference. In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transfers herself to a San Francisco-area web server, which happens to host a bee enthusiast website known as I Love Bees. To the distress of Dana Awbrey, the website's maintainer, Melissa's attempts to send signals began to appear largely as codes, hidden in images or other text, interfering with the operation of the I Love Bees site and corrupting much of the content.

At the same time, another AI program appears which has until now remained dormant in Melissa's system. Calling itself "The Sleeping Princess" this AI takes control of the webmaster's email address for ilovebees.com, but because this AI has difficulty using the English language, it instead uses phrases constructed from parts of emails already sent to it.

Dana, attempting to regain control over the corrupted website, accidentally erases data which comprises part of Melissa's memory. Furious, Melissa lashes out at the webmaster, obtaining pictures of her using the webcam on her computer and promising to take revenge. Alarmed, Dana announces she is washing her hands of the situation and is taking a previously planned trip to China earlier than expected.

While the Spider program attempts to fix Melissa, random dumps from Melissa's memory began to spill into the website, largely detailing Melissa's history and expanding on the story element of the ilovebees game. Of particular note was the revealing of yet another AI, a malicious Trojan-horse virus long infecting Melissa later known as the "Pious Flea." The Spider tries to erase the Flea but is outwitted, as Melissa erases the Spider instead of the Flea. The Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming with its own mysterious goals.

Meanwhile, Melissa reveals audio files to people she believes to be loyal members of her crew. These audio files are largely unlocked as real-life players met at the prearranged payphones that the times listed, often having to recite specific phrases mentioned on the site in order to complete their mission. Slowly, a story emerged following a band of unlikely heroes. These characters included Janissary James, the 17 year old daughter of a super soldier; another military AI, named "Durga," residing in the computer system of a teenager named Jersey Morelli; a medical student/immigrant to Earth from a colony world called Coral named Kamal Zaman; and a Junior-level Office of Naval Intelligence analyst named Rani.

With the assistance of other characters, the real-life protagonists broke into a secure military installation and managed to deactivate a Forerunner device which was implied (though never conclusively proven) to begin the firing sequence of the Halo installations. However, the price paid for the deactivation was a powerful energy transmission which alerted the Covenant of the location of Earth.

Whole again, Melissa saw how she had been manipulated by the Pious Flea, and returned to her own time, merging with Durga. As a parting gift, she also left another series of audio clips. These audio clips show how the main characters of ILB fared. The tone is somber, as ILB ended with the Covenant invading Earth, corresponding to a major plot point in Halo 2.

ILB 'ends' the same way in which it began. The System Peril Distributed Reflex, thought to be destroyed, is again in control of ilovebees.com, and again there is a countdown on the site, but it is a 500 year countdown coinciding with the fictional timeline of Halo, and likely corresponds to the day the Covenant invades Earth in Halo 2. This improved SPDR destroyed the Pious Flea, the Covenant virus that brought about the discovery of Earth and led the Covenant to it, once and for all.

[edit] Development

Even while the game was running, it became clear that ilovebees was a publicity stunt engineered at least in part by Bungie Studios to build hype for the upcoming release of their title in development, Halo 2. Microsoft had played a large part in a similar publicity stunt previously, with their involvement in The Beast [1], an ARG used to promote the movie A.I.. The speculation was finally proven after the conclusion of ilovebees, when it was revealed that the developers of The Beast, 42 Entertainment, were in fact the creators of ilovebees.

Bungie also has had a history of doing promotional puzzles for upcoming games, specifically relating to the Halo franchise. Prior to the announcement of Halo: Combat Evolved, former Bungie employee Nathan Bitner released a series of cryptic emails later called the "Cortana Letters". Although not strictly an ARG, the Cortana Letters did encourage fan participation, and melded reality with fiction as Bungie employees pretended to have no idea who Cortana was or how she was sending her emails.

[edit] Reception

I Love Bees is credited with helping drive attention to Halo 2; former Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Dan Hsu stated in an interview that "I Love Bees really got existing gamers and other consumers talking about the universe of [Halo]."[9] Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst, noted that I Love Bees achieved what it had been designed to do: "This kind of viral guerrilla marketing worked... Everyone started instant messaging about it and checking out the site."[10] I Love Bees not only received coverage from gaming publications, but attracted mainstream press attention as well.[1] At its height, ilovebees received between two to three million unique visitors over the course of three months.[1] 9,000 people also actively participated in the real-world aspects of the game.[11]

The players of I Love Bees themselves were quite varied. The target demographic for the promotion was younger males, but one player noted that even middle-aged men and women were engaged in the game.[12]

[edit] Awards

I Love Bees received numerous awards for its innovation.[9] The design team was one of the recipients of the Innovation Award at the 5th annual Game Developers Choice Awards.[13] I Love Bees was also announced as the winner of a Webby Award in the Game-Related category,[14] presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

[edit] Legacy

Along with 42 Entertainments' previous ARG known as The Beast, I Love Bees is credited with bringing greater attention to the fledgling marketing form; I Love Bees not only helped assuage fears by marketers about the costs of ARG failure, but attracted interest from other game developers in using alternate reality games to promote their own products.[15] Before I Love Bees, The Guardian stated that "ARGs were destined to join Letsbuyit.com and Barcode Battlers in the e-dustbin of nice ideas that never really caught on"; the explosion of broadband internet access and a renewed interest in codes allowed I Love Bees to become wildly successful.[16] Bungie would later use another ARG called "Iris" to promote Halo 2's sequel, Halo 3.[17]

I Love Bees also attracted attention in the wider discussion of user-based marketing and cooperation. Author Charles Leadbeater argued that I Love Bees was an example of "We-Think" collective thinking; Leadbeater noted that after the "puppet masters" began the game, I Love Bees "displayed all the characteristics of a mass movement, propelled into existence in a matter of weeks simply by collective enthusiasm guided by a few cyberspace 'avatars'".[18]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Wegert, Tessa. Advertisers reap real-world benefits from 'alternate reality'. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved on 2008-05-13.
  2. ^ Borland, John (2005-02-28). Blurring the line between games and life. CNET Networks. Retrieved on 2008-05-19.
  3. ^ a b Devidas, Arun (2004-10-18). Halo 2: Remember the Bees. IGN. Retrieved on 2008-04-12.
  4. ^ Zumbrum, Josh (2007-07-21). Mystery Movie Teaser Has Gamers Seeking Alternate Reality. The Washington Post. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  5. ^ a b Terdiman, Daniel (2007-05-07). GDC 07: I Love Bees developer gets Serious. Gamespot. Retrieved on 2008-05-20.
  6. ^ a b c Shachtman, Noah (2004-11-04). Sci-Fi Fans Are Called Into an Alternate Reality. The New York Times. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  7. ^ Fabijanic, Taya (2005-02-26). Down the rabbit hole. The Age. Retrieved on 2008-04-24.
  8. ^ Goldstein, Hilary (2004-11-04). Countdown to Halo 2: Entering the Beehive. IGN. Retrieved on 2008-05-20.
  9. ^ a b Rosmarin, Rachel (2007-09-23). Burnishing Halo. Forbes. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  10. ^ Brandon, John (January 2005). "Online This Month; Hoax sites: everybody plays the fool". Electronic Gaming Monthly (187): 46. 
  11. ^ McGonigall, Jane (2005-05-20). All GameplayIs Performance. AvantGame. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  12. ^ Clark, Sue (2004-10-22). The Buzz: Alternate Reality. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  13. ^ IGDA (2005-03-10). IGDA Names Recipients of the 2005 Game Developers Choice Awards. Archived from the original on 2005-12-11.
  14. ^ 9th Annual Webby Awards Nominees and Winners. International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (2005). Retrieved on 2008-05-19.
  15. ^ Hon, Adrian (2005-05-09). The Rise of ARGs. Gamasutra. Retrieved on 2008-05-20.
  16. ^ Carr, Paul (2005-04-04). The game with no aim. The Guardian. Retrieved on 2008-01-26.
  17. ^ Sanders, Holly (2007-07-12). 'Halo' on the Hunt. New York Post. Retrieved on 2008-04-01.
  18. ^ Lott, Tim. "The Internet is Proving that 200 Heads are Better than One", Sunday Telegraph, 2008-03-30, p. 42. 

[edit] External links

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